The Next Time You See Me (3 page)

She stared silently at the perfect, whole press-on nail, imagining the woman who would have glued it to her finger, a woman with a man’s short hair and a man’s plain T-shirt but the vanity to want her hands to look nice. She sat back and lifted her head to inhale, like a diver surfacing for air: a crescent of moon was etched against the night sky, so bright that when she blinked she saw its afterglow.

It was getting too dark to linger. She could make out between the trees the distant twinkle of lights from Sheila Friend’s house. Higher in the sky, and brighter, was a single security lamp, marking the roadway. She started moving in that direction. Her body throbbed with an electric charge, energy that might have spilled into a sprint or a scream, but it was lodged in her, stuck, and she couldn’t run on her bad ankle anyway. When she emerged at the road, she paused, nonplussed by the orderly procession of telephone lines, the reasonable graveled shoulder. Sheila Friend’s mailbox was visible from here—it was tan, painted with bright cardinals and curling ivy. Emily stared at the birds, dazed. A full minute passed. Then, as if in a dream, she started hobbling downhill.

If Mr. Powell had still been out in his front yard as she passed it, she might have gone to him, reassured by his authority as a neighbor, as an acquaintance of her father’s. But the car was pulled back into his driveway and the front door was shut tight. The light of a television flicked against the blinds of an otherwise dark corner room—probably a bedroom. Emily kept moving.

In another few moments she was home, the night around her now absolute. Her house, the small pale rectangle of it, was illuminated:
she could see the pulse and flash of their own television in the living room, her mother’s shadow in the kitchen window. Her father’s Ford pickup truck was parked in the gravel drive.

She went in through the back door, and as soon as she entered the kitchen and its familiar smells—the low smoke of the wall heater; the stench of stewed cabbage, fleetingly reminiscent of the horror Emily had left back in the woods—her mother tossed her dishrag on the stovetop, took a shaky breath, and said, “Where on earth have you been?” She stopped, looking over Emily from head to toe, frowning. “You’re filthy. What happened?” Her hands were on Emily’s face now, warm against Emily’s cold skin. She put a palm to Emily’s forehead, considering, and then switched to the back of her hand, and then she was turning Emily in place as though she were trying to see if her shirt and pants fit right, the way she did when Emily tried on school clothes at Sears and Roebuck. “What happened?” Hands running up and down her legs, as though she were being checked by the police for a gun. “What happened?”

Emily’s father appeared in the doorway, the lines around his mouth pinched in a way that didn’t yet commit to anger or concern. “Where’ve you been? Kelly, what’s wrong with her?”

Emily said, “I tripped and twisted my ankle.” It was out of her mouth before she realized she was going to say it. She hadn’t decided on that walk home not to mention the body—it hadn’t occurred to her that she could opt not to—but now she was being led to a kitchen chair and her father was rolling up her pant leg to examine the ankle (“It’s a little swollen, but it don’t look broke to me,” he was saying, and her mother, breathlessly, “Are you sure?”), and her stomach was growling a little at the sight of a bag of Doritos, unopened, on the table to her left. She hadn’t screamed. She hadn’t sounded an alarm. She pulled the sack of chips closer and tweezed the top between her fingers, pulling, releasing the putrid-pleasant scent of corn and cheese into her face as her father quizzed her on where, and why, and how, and
What the heck are you thinking, rambling around by yourself at night?
Her mother brought her a Coca-Cola, opened, and Emily
did what she loved: she put a chip into her mouth and crunched, and while the crumbs were still circling inside her mouth, getting milled by her teeth and tongue, she chased them with a long draft of the soda, the sweet and bubbles washing it all down the back of her throat. She wiped her right hand, the one she’d used to touch that press-on nail, absentmindedly on the thigh of her jeans, then reached into the bag for another chip.

She didn’t know how to begin to say what she knew, to explain what she had seen. Already her memory of the body felt unreal, like something she could not trust, and she put another chip on her tongue, considering.

“We should take her to the doctor tomorrow,” her mother was saying.

“I’d have to use my sick leave. Or else get docked a point.”

“I’m fine,” Emily said. “I don’t want to go to the doctor.”

Billy came into the kitchen, arms crossed with paternal gruffness. “You were late,” he said. “Dinner is at five. Mom was going to make me eat my dinner late.”

Emily glared at him. Billy was tall and pear-shaped, with a doughy stomach and broad, almost womanly hips. His eyes were large and moist, with thick, long lashes, and his full lips were raw with painful-looking cracks, because he had a nervous habit of chewing, then pulling, the chapped skin. His sweetness, his simple good nature, was held in check by a strong sense of entitlement, which their parents generally obliged, and so Emily had long ago fallen into a habit of feeling irritated by him, then guilty for the irritation. She did not realize how alike they were.

“He was anxious for you,” her mother said apologetically. “He just wants things to be normal.”

“Normal,” Emily echoed.

“Yeah, normal,” Billy said with the bratty authority of a second grader.

Her parents drifted back to their familiar places—her mother to the stove, her father to the living room, where he could watch
TV—and Emily washed down another chip with a swallow of cola. Had she seen what she thought she saw? Maybe she should go back tomorrow, make sure. She was afraid—but there was also curiosity. Even possessiveness. If she told, she wouldn’t be able to have another look at the body, and she realized that she wanted to. Just once more. Just to make sure.

Chapter Two

1.

Susanna Mitchell was late again picking up her daughter from the KiddieKare.
There aren’t enough hours in the day;
this is what she’d say to her sister whenever they both managed to carve out an hour of time for each other, on the phone or over thin, greasy cheeseburgers at the K-Grill. A cliché, but Susanna hadn’t happened upon a truer way of putting it.

It was a quarter past five. Stuck at her third red light in a row, she slapped the steering wheel of her car a few times with the meaty heel of her palm, then backhanded tears from her eyes with a mascara-stained knuckle. “Damn it,” she whispered. Then, because there was no one around to hear her: “Fuck.”

Hound’s Liquors was up ahead, just before the turn to the day care and her daughter, and Susanna popped her turn signal to the right. She was already late: in for a penny, in for a pound. It was Friday, and normally her husband, Dale, would give the marching band the night off from practice, or they’d be playing the halftime show at the football game, but tomorrow was state quarterfinals, and Susanna knew from experience that he’d be working them to exhaustion, letting them out no earlier than nine or ten o’clock tonight when the first parents started making threatening noises to pull their children
off the field by force. She and Abby would be alone this evening, and Abby would probably be tired—it had been unusually warm for late October, in the midsixties, and she would have been out on the playground most of the day—so maybe Susanna could have some wine and a slow bath and a good cry without worrying about answering to anybody. Was that too much to ask?

She passed her gaze over the bright bottles, the fancy fruit-infused liqueurs with French and Italian names, the whiskeys that glowed amber with backlighting. Finally she purchased her usual seven-dollar bottle of pinot grigio, which was already chilled in the front cooler. Dale barely tolerated her wine drinking and groused on the rare occasions she brought liquor into the house. Did she want to end up like her father? Like her no-account sister?

“Are you ready for the weekend?” the clerk asked, smiling as he punched the price into the cash register. He was a man Susanna knew by reputation, an Indian who owned both Hound’s and the town’s two newest hotels, a Comfort Inn and a Best Western, and he was probably a millionaire, or close. But he was always here, always dressed in a polo shirt and loose-fitting khakis that had the ragged look of a Goodwill purchase. His one show of wealth was a bracelet of near-orange gold, dense and glittery against the brown skin of his forearm.

“As I’ll ever be,” Susanna said tiredly. She always felt like a single mother during band season; she couldn’t remember the last time she’d been able to go for a long walk, or out shopping with a friend, or even to bed early with a good book. Abby wanted not just company but constant attention, and Susanna, who’d had an uneasy childhood, was loath to deny her.

The clerk handed her the brown bag he’d packed. “Drive safely,” he told her.

Back in the car she sat, engine idling, and looked at the bottle for a moment, thinking about her sister, Ronnie. They rarely drank together, she and Ronnie—Ronnie, like their father had, drank to get wasted and loud, and Susanna drank to get sedated. She wished that they could drink together tonight, though. She imagined it for
a moment: Abby tucked in, out cold, and she and Ronnie downing vodka tonics and watching a movie that they both liked and having some laughs before falling asleep in their armchairs. Susanna could vent about work, and Ronnie could say something like, “Forget that little brat, and forget that rich bitch with the stick up her ass. She’s a bored housewife with nothing better to do than get in your face,” and Susanna would, temporarily at least, believe her. Susanna believed Ronnie about these things better than she did Dale. She knew that Ronnie wouldn’t bullshit her.

Dale didn’t like Ronnie. He didn’t like her drinking or her swearing or the way she dressed—reasons enough, he said, to keep her away from Abby. Dale could always tell when Ronnie had come over to the house, because Ronnie couldn’t go an hour without a smoke and Susanna wasn’t going to make her sister sit outside every time she had one. He’d walk through the door, sniff, and frown. He’d check the trash can for ashes, the sink for a lipstick-stained glass, making a big show to prove a point, as though he were looking for the signs of a lover instead of his own sister-in-law.

It had been—Susanna racked her brain and did the math, putting her car into gear—about two weeks since she’d heard from Ronnie. Could that be right? She’d called Susanna on a Thursday night, when she knew Dale would be at band practice, and yes, it must have been two weeks (and a day) because Susanna had been complaining about having to do chaperon’s duty at the high school’s homecoming dance. “Why should middle school faculty get roped into that?” she’d asked. “I don’t see high school faculty coming down here to run the concession stands at our football games.” Grousing to Dale never did her any good. Dale taught music and band at both schools and thought that he had insights into the administrative realities that Susanna couldn’t grasp.

But in fact, she was late picking up Abby because of one of those “administrative realities.” Christopher Shelton’s mother had wandered in after school let out, demanding to know why her son had been given detention. Principal Wally Burton, in typical Wally Burton
fashion, had immediately ushered the parent to Susanna’s classroom—God forbid he should have to put in an extra fifteen minutes after final bell—and left her in the doorway, smiling his slippery smile and saying, “Mrs. Mitchell will explain everything, don’t you worry, ma’am,” before disappearing.

Susanna had stood and extended a hand, already wary. She usually ran into two kinds of parents at Roma Middle School: the very poor and the very well-to-do. The poor parents Susanna could manage; they reminded her of her own folks, or at least her mother. The woman in Susanna’s classroom today was one of the well-to-do parents, and not just manager-at-the-factory money, either, which was the kind of slightly above-average salary that could sometimes pass for wealth in Roma. Real money.
Executive
factory money. Unlike the lawyers’ wives or the doctors’ wives in town, this woman made no special effort to garishly display her wealth. No big rocks, except the stunner on her left-hand ring finger; no thick cloud of pricey perfume. She was dressed in simple clothes—a black blouse and slacks and riding boots, with a cropped red sweater as accent—and these items, though not ostentatious, struck Susanna as well cut, as suited to the woman’s figure in a way that Susanna, armed with this same woman’s credit card, could never have been able to approximate. The woman’s dark blond hair, too, was very well cut, worn in a slightly angled bob—not so angled that it seemed unfeminine—and tucked behind an equally well-shaped ear.

“It’s nice to meet you, ma’am,” Susanna had said, all at once certain that the woman would spurn her extended hand. But Christopher’s mother shook it firmly, smiling, so Susanna had cleared her throat a little and smoothed her wrinkled paisley skirt and motioned to a pair of school desks. “Would you like to sit down?”

“Thank you,” the woman said, somehow managing to slide elegantly into one of the desks. Her voice fit the rest of her: sophisticated, pleasant, no trace of an accent. “Mr. Burton told me that you’d be the person who could explain why my son got detention today over some kind of a writing exercise.”

Susanna, still smarting over this morning’s humiliation, took a deep breath. Christopher—she had to admit this to herself—was a very, very bright boy, probably categorically “gifted.” One of the best in his grade, and one of the best to pass through Susanna’s classroom, too. His paper on
Bridge to Terabithia
had been a marvel, as well constructed and elegant as his mother’s hairdo, and he could be earnest and insightful in class discussions. But he was also arrogant, dismissive of any activity he deemed beneath him, and this arrogance had been revealing itself lately in more frequent acts of defiance, today’s by far the worst.